Today I had to take “compliance training” for work.  The phrase suggests an activity that might involve leather or vinyl outfits, but alas, it wasn’t nearly that interesting.  It consisted of page after page of power-point-like slides, each bearing a single piece of clip art to massage the right-brain visual field while the authors attempted to insinuate their data into the left (or vice versa). At the outset, a man in a tie expressed his heart-felt conviction that “Compliance is the key to your success” which I interpreted as “submit or be crushed.”  Sadly, I suspect that if confronted with this information, he’d shrug and say, “Well, yeah.  What’s wrong with that?”

But the evil plan backfired.

You see, the choice of clip art was really an exercise in unconscious revelation by the bureaucratic people that put this test together.  Like a prisoner in solitary confinement who watches ants come and go through a crack in the edifice, it gave me something to hold on to.  They are not in total control.  They are human.

Let’s start with these two, intended to illustrate slides about communication, showing a bunch of office drones interacting in a spirit of identity-less bonhomie.  Literally, they are faceless, and by extension, we, the employees taking this test, are under pressure to relinquish our identity to the cause of corporate assimilation.

The business school graduate who put this stuff together probably wasn’t consciously thinking about this in an explicit way.  But the next one… oy.  What’s the excuse here?  The pretense of the value of the individual has been dropped.  We will be paved over by data, our faces obscured by computation, the edges of our bodies indistinct and merged with the stuff of work.   To make it scarier, in the background is one of the buildings on campus, a familiar sight.  I am not feeling too good about this!  Are they trying to motivate me with fear or have they so totally abandoned themselves to the machine that this doesn’t strike them as Orwellian?

I can’t help but notice that this person has not been successfully deprived of individuality.  She (for it is clearly a woman) would be recognizable, if you knew her.  A subsequent slide seemed to strive for a more thorough immolation, transforming the unfortunate subject into a menacing, Michael-Jacksonesque android.  Look into that eye - it is slack; all hope has been drained from it.  This point was not lost on me as I contemplated this image about 90 minutes into the grueling exercise in submission, and knew that I was not even half done.

Having made their point and forced me to sit at the computer far longer than ever I could have wished, they now began to taunt me with hallucinatory visions of time, which while certainly echoing my state of mind, probably revealed the author’s also, as they were forced into the same mire into which they pushed my face.  This guy’s profile looks strangely like my own:

I’ve read that control of a subject’s grasp of time is one of the fundamental aspects of brainwashing. A proxy for everyone taking the test, the woman in this image is hanging on  for dear life:

But the authors, revealing a bit of their desire to control things,  have let a bit of their spirit show, as in the following image, where another (and far fitter) woman resentfully confronts the enormous, hovering clock:

Their composure beginning to crack, the authors made a critical mistake.  They allowed the next guy to have a full face.  It is a stalwart face, a depiction of the organization man astride the machinery of productivity, with time and money in a position of coequal primacy. As appropriate for evil overlords everywhere, the earth is centered firmly in the crosshairs - but he has an identity!  It was like a fart during a piano sonata.  They are human after all.  They have weaknesses.

That’s right, he not only is uniquely identifiable, but even capable of expressing emotion, a totally non-work-related concept.  Having overcome one barrier, the authors now let fly with this uninhibited piece, perhaps as they toiled away in the cubicles at 11:30PM, ignoring calls from their families:

Perhaps after review by management, the authors returned to their original purpose with a new will to conquer.  They tried to reassert dominance of the self with the following uninspiring images, calculated to drain the viewer of independent spirit.  The message: “This is all you can be.  This is your purpose.  Do not stray from the box.” This is reinforced with the epitome of all office achievements, the production of a signed document, about which we are implicitly encouraged to feel as a hen does about her new egg.  Note the smug satisfaction and repressed sexuality (expressed in her blaze of red hair) of the first character, and the way the authors caught themselves and made the second one faceless:

In a further attempt to alienate the viewers, the authors threw in this image, encouraging us to avoid human contact and movement at the same time, although they have really lost the ability to suppress humanity, and have again allowed the portly office people to have faces.  Note, however, the aggressive, robot overlord cameras leering sternly over their subjects.  Really - have you ever seen a camera with a slit?  Those are not simple lenses, but turrets from which beams are focused. Positioned dominantly over the monitors, they not only supervise the people, but control the information on the computers.

At this point I feel it necessary to share with you the naked truth of this test.  Having only seen the images, you might be tempted to think that I’m exaggerating about the banality of the material.  I am pleased to present to you a sample, the real thing, a tangible pebble from my journey into hell.  I might have thought it were a nightmare, but for this evidence, taken directly from the source.  Note the derision inherent in the Question’s title.  After reading it, will you feel “enriched?”  Can the authors have produced this without a note of irony?

Now we arrive at the security section, so a suitably dry photograph of locks, code books, and some kind of computer media was required.  But wait - what is that, sitting on the book?  Can it be - is that a spleef?  I think the authors were really careless at this point and unable to continue this mind-numbing task without chemical assistance.  Already stoned, they neglectfully left evidence in the frame.  Without outside help, I had to endure - like a civil war casualty biting a 50-caliber ball.  Grimly, I held on.

Now blissed out and surrendering to the indomitable human spirit, the authors produced this piece of neo-socialist realism - a nod to some Stalinesque overlord - but were unable to suppress references to identity, art, and emotion.  Color is breaking out, and it has shades!  The triumph of the human spirit at last!  These are not mindless office drones- they are free and full of inner motivation!  They are fashionable and slender!  You might want to be these people; they are on the phone, perhaps making plans for after work.  The witch is dead! Flowers are blooming in the spring! The test is over!

Is it me, or does that last one reek of Marc Chagall?  As it always will, although they tried to subvert it to their purpose, art and beauty won out in the end.  Although it wasn’t part of the presentation, I’ll include this here for purposes of comparison.  This knowledge set me free.  There is a way out.

Seriously, people!  Such a sparkling example of mediocrity has not crossed my desk in a while.  Is this the world we want to live in? Can we not do better?  Surely there are some public domain images of Chagall or other artists that could have been stuck in here.  I don’t want to live and work in a world of intellectual junk food.  I resist!

What do you think this is? Tree branches at night? A satellite photograph of rivers?  Care to guess?

Scroll down to find out…

Here it is in color:

It’s dry desert mud .

In the next image of a cactus flower, there is an insect inside. I’ve looked at many flowers in the deserts of Colorado, Utah and Arizona; there seems to be a different kind of insect that’s specialized to hang out inside each type of flower.

I’ve been too busy to be creative, so here’s a link.

http://www.lowell.edu/dct/tour.php?req=domepanels&pic=tour_domepanel08.jpg

Here is a letter I sent to friends recently - I’ll put it here as a catch-all for people I might have missed.

—

Greetings all!

If you find anyone that I’ve left off of this email, please forward it to them. Omission from this list is accidental!

It has been a few months since I left the Lab and I have been thinking about all of you. After a 6-week marathon session of home refurbishing, car purchasing and all kinds of last-minute details, we (Holly and myself) rented our house to a great lady (who is taking care of our dog) and hit the road. We drove for about two weeks, eventually landing up in Flagstaff, AZ. Along the way, we stopped to see the creation museum in Kentucky (it was like the twighlight zone), Arches national park, monument Valley, many smaller parks, friends along the way, and of course too many interesting roadside sights to mention here. The trip length was 2900 miles.

I have been at my new job for three weeks. The assignment is as challenging as any I have faced at JHUAPL, but the conditions of work are very different. Lowell Observatory is like a big family. There are only 80 people on staff. Everyone knows everyone else. Although I have many tasks, they are all for the same project. I don’t have to worry about what I’m going to be doing next month, and don’t have to fill out a weekly time sheet. Among the staff, there is a sense of work/life balance, but also an intense feeling of dedication to the work and to the institution. There is a sense that the work is important, and a sense of the history of the institution. The campus is situated within a national forest on a small pine-covered mountain overlooking Flagstaff at 7300 feet. There are breathtaking views of mountains and many animals around the place. It is dog-friendly and some people bring dogs to work. In three weeks, I’ve purchased one tank of gas, and probably won’t need another one for a week or two unless I go on a trip.

We have been living in temporary quarters in a historic building on campus; the building is filled with historical curiosities dating back to the 1890s when Percival Lowell began his investigations on the planet Mars. We’ve found a special apartment of our own, less than a mile away from Lowell, and will soon move into it. The observatory is the local center of public science education, in the same way as the Baltimore aquarium (only smaller), so there is a constant stream of visitors. The facilities are open until after dark, and if the weather is good and the sky clear (which it usually is) visitors can look through the historic 24-inch telescope which dates back to 1896. Flagstaff has just the right balance of small-town and large-town features. The place has an old town district with many locally-owned businesses, restaurants and art galleries. On the outskirts there is a wal-mart, supermarkets, etc. It is a resort town, but with all the conveniences needed. The grand canyon is 1.5 hours away. Many of the country’s most famous national parks (Zion, Canyon de Chelley, Meteor crater, petrified forest, etc.) are weekend trips. It is a very outdoorsy society and almost everyone you see is athletic and tanned, but in a mountain way, not a Miami way. The city is full of trails; mountain biking, climbing and skiing are big here. In the summer, people come from the desert cities (Phoenix, Tuscon, etc.) to get out of the heat. In the winter, people in Flagstaff can be in the desert in an hour or so to get some alternative weather. Simply walking around the streets on an errand, you can see breathtaking sights like a pink sunset over volcanoes. Like any place it has some problems (traffic from tourists, transient homeless, the danger of urban sprawl) but there is nothing like this in Maryland, even counting the wonderful eastern shore and mountainous western portion of the state.

When I left I promised I’d keep up with my friends back home. Although you are out of sight, you are definitely not out of mind. I am still in the process of processing pictures and writing about our adventures, but some of them are on my blog. Here are the main links. If you’d like to keep up to date, take a look at the blog periodically. I post something at least every week, and will be posting about our trip out here for weeks to come.

http://spleen-me.com/blog (the blog main page)

http://spleen-me.com/blog/?p=853 (daily maps of progress and short descriptions of that day, keep hitting “next”)

http://spleen-me.com/blog/?p=869 (creation museum, this stirred up a minor controversy. See comments at end of post, and also http://spleen-me.com/blog/?p=1075 )

http://spleen-me.com/blog/?p=1032 (St. Louis)

http://spleen-me.com/blog/?p=998 (monument valley)

http://spleen-me.com/blog/?p=1161 (the telescope)

http://spleen-me.com/blog/?p=978 and http://spleen-me.com/blog/?p=1082 (pictures of where we live)

Fondly, Dan

Recently there was a Lowell Observatory Advisory board meeting.  A couple of my colleagues and myself gave tours of the construction site to  board members.  The discovery channel telescope ( or DCT, so named because of significant funding from that television channel) is being built on a mesa near Happy jack, AZ.

You can see that the building is in an advanced state of construction; the telescope itself is not yet completed and is not yet inside.

The portion on top that is mostly girders - “the dome” will weigh about 1/3 of a million pounds when complete.  It will be turned by four electric motors.  The telescope is a leviathan that will weigh some 145000 pounds and sit on its own bearing and have its own motors.  The dome and telescope will turn together in separate but synchronized motion.

The telescope and the interior of the dome must be kept at the same temperature as outside so that there are no thermal disturbances which will mess up the optical seeing.  To do this, the building has many vent doors which can be opened, as well as active liquid cooling that will control the temperature of the telescope’s mirrors.  Also, air will be drawn through the tubular support structure of the telescope as well as the mirror mount.

Here are a couple pictures of me during the tour, taken by Holly.

Here I am explaining the Active Optics System (AOS).  It is not designed to correct atmospheric distortions, but to control the shape of the main mirror while the telescope moves around. Although the mirror is made of ultra-low-expansion glass, and a chunk of it would seem rigid, you can think of it as a blanket of glass.  It weighs 6,700 lbs is about 4.2 meters - 14 feet - across and only 10 cm thick.  So, as it moves, it wrinkles and sags.  You can not see this with the naked eye, but since the mirror needs to be maintained in shape by only a fraction of a wavelength of light (less than 1 millionth of a meter), it is a problem.  To counteract this, there are mechanical “pushers” around the periphery and underneath the mirror.  These components push, pull and lift the mirror to maintain its shape.  The mirror is not bolted to its mount, because that  would distort the surface to the mirror and thus the resulting image.  It is made to slide around while the mechanical compensators keep it in shape and in the right position.

I am pointing at an engineering drawing of the mirror on its mount.  To my right is a rendering of the telescope which will sit inside the dome.  I’ll really have to get some JPEGS to post here.

Inside the dome, under construction.

One of the numerous dome bearings that will support the enormous mass of the dome structure and allow it to turn smoothly.

View looking up from the mezzanine level.  The temporary wooden structure fills the space that will be occupied by the telescope.

View of the landscape around the telescope site.  It’s in the coconino national forest north of Phoenix.

The day’s pictures (including some already shown above):

For “official” photos of the site as well an engineering documents and more, see here.

Here are images of the  slipher apartment, where we have been temporarily lodged at Lowell.  We have the entire portion of the upper floor to the left of the rotunda.

See here for the view from the porch, and more images here.

I’ve been underground for a while, but I can now share what I’ve been doing.  I’ve decided to make a big change in my life by changing jobs.  I wanted to keep it quiet until it was official.  It is now completely official - I am going to work for Lowell observatory, on a team building this.

It will be an adventure.  This project involves change to almost every facet of my life, and my wife Holly’s too.

I have always loved the process and the machinery of science, and this is right up my alley.  I want to contribute to something meaningful, and to me this is such a thing.  It seems worth the effort.  I grew up admiring astronomers - one of the first books I owned was an elementary college astronomy textbook - so what could be cooler than working on such a project?  And one of the great things about major telescopes - they’re always in beautiful places.  This one is situated in the high forest of northern Arizona; not the desert.

In order to do this, I will have to be in residence in Flagstaff, Arizona much of the year.  We’ll start by moving there for the summer.  We’ll come back to Maryland and for the rest of the year, I’ll spend significant chunks of time working from home in Maryland, periodically traveling to Arizona.  For the long periods, Holly will be coming with me.  Next year we’ll spend more of our time in Arizona.  So we’ll be commuting from Maryland to Arizona, partially living in both places.

So I’ve been looking for apartments in Flagstaff, buying a second car to use in Arizona, becoming a landlord in order to rent out my house in Maryland while I’m gone, and taking care of a lot of other details such as what to do with the cat, the fish, and the dog?  I’ve done some careful and agonizing financial planning.  We have to partially move out of our house to make room for the tenant who will occupy it while we’re gone.  There was a lengthy, steely-eyed poker-game negotiating phase between myself and the observatory, while we each pondered the possibilities of this unique situation.  I had to give up a plum assignment at Johns Hopkins that would have taken me to Kaua’i for months this winter.  I’ve spent every spare minute reading professional textbooks about this new project and its technologies.  And that’s just the beginning of it.

If you think it’s hard to bend one person’s plans around something like this, how about two people?  But the plan we’ve come up with will allow us to preserve Holly’s career on this coast while allowing me to pursue this project.  Holly and I have been working together to make it happen.  Without her encouragement, i would not even have sent in an application.  In fact, a lot of people have been helping.  We convened a jury of friends to help us make this big decision.  Others provided phone and email support during decision times.  I am indebted to my friends for all of their support!

And it doesn’t hurt to know that we’ll be 1.5 hours away from the grand canyon - it will become a day trip for us.  The Flagstaff area is close to many outdoorsy locations of interest - the petrified forest, grand canyon, monument valley, etc. - and within reach of many others.  Flagstaff is like an island; it is forested and cool, but only an hour away the sizzling desert lies in every direction.  Here’s a picture i took when I was there for the job interview (see this post for more):

I’ve just stopped working at Johns Hopkins, and am using a few weeks to get my affairs in order.  Imagine that you drew a line in the sand and said “after this date, I will live with only the possessions that I can pack in the car.”  All of your projects - things that you’ve procrastinated on, put off fixing, reading, buying, selling, completing, whatever - all have to be brought to some sort of closure.

We’ll start our drive across the country in Early May, and have a grand old American driving vacation as we travel to this exciting future.  Along the way we will visit friends, see wonderful things, and have lots of new experiences.  At the end of the journey lies Flagstaff, like Oz at the end of the rainbow.  And once we reach that city, a new exploration begins - a new job, a new location, a new way of living and of working.

Many things about the future are uncertain.  That is both the frightening and the sublime thing about life; but I am surfing that wave for all its worth.

… is when you’re minding your own business, trying to fly your oceanographic research flight, and someone calls your attention to an engine fault.  “It might be happening, he says,” “But then again, it might not.  Hard to tell.”  When asked what the consequences of having the problem are, he replies “Well, either nothing - just a bad indicator - or… an engine rips itself apart and turns into a flaming comet.”

It had been a nice flight up to that point; earlier I’d had a little stick time, banking and working the aircraft into some clouds at 18K feet, playing with the thrust of the four engines and different flight surfaces.  Great fun.

So we sit momentarily and consider which of these options we’d like to experience, while gazing at the innocuous engines and the scenery over Vancouver Island, BC.

We opt to treat it as the worst possible problem; we shut that engine down and head for base.  Problem is, we’re too heavy to land - wouldn’t want to crack that landing gear or bend the wings too much.  So we orbit, burning off fuel, and dump the belly tank.  Basically, a button is pressed, and a thousand gallons of expensive, useful  jet fuel sprays out of the trailing edge of the wing.  If you haven’t had the pleasure of seeing it yourself, here’s what it looks like:

And of course, you can’t do something like this and then simply land normally.  You’ve got to have the shiny, happy blinky fire truck reception committee:

It’s always exciting at the airfield.  And oh - in case you’re wondering, it was a bad indicator.

Here’s a wing.  Look at the pretty wing.  I like wings.  I sometimes get a few moments, when conducting one of these oceanographic missions, to contemplate things like this.

But wait… what’s special about this one?  Let’s take a closer look:

Yes kids, that’s ice.  Ice is bad.  It makes wings go away, kind of.  And we like wings, remember?  The speed of ice formation was rather dramatic - less than five minutes, and it seemed to accelerate rapidly, building upon itself.  Here’s a stop-motion look:

You can learn something about the internal structure of the spinner cone by looking at this; it must have struts or ribs underneath that conduct heat away, or perhaps surface irregularities that cause local pressure changes that induce crystal formations.  Whatever the cause, it is neat.  Neat in that detached way you can have when you’re inside the aircraft and it’s changing altitudes repeatedly in an effort to get rid of said ice, and you can tell that you’re just a few minutes away from having a real aviation crisis.  But until then, it’s just neat.

Let’s take a look at the tail’s horizontal stabilizer.  It’s iced up pretty good!  I could actually see the ice thickening.

Eventually, our de-icing system worked, the ice fell off, and all was well.  No crisis.  Neat!

I received a business-related email that has left me so delighted I can’t contain myself.  I’ve put some text in bold for emphasis:

“The analyst who needs to perform the
work will be free on Monday to do so. He is backed up right now with
some lab-wide items that need to be addressed. I am sorry for the
incontinence.”

Oh!  the humanity.  I am certain that the person who sent this has no clue about what he/she wrote.